During my first year in Florence (2009) I learned all about photography history, stereoscopy, light, exposure and diaphragms, negatives and positives, black & white paper chemical development and fixing, making contact sheets, printing with an enlarger, and more. I loved spending time in the Architecture Department's darkroom, where we had a pretty awesome view of Florence's Cathedral, although just through a small gap in the wall! And from there, with a simple shoe box, I created my own camera obscura: similar to the uni's darkroom set-up, light passes through a tiny hole and projects an reversed image on the opposite side where light-sensitive special paper is placed so that the negative gets imprinted, then developed and finally inverted to create the positive.
― believe it or not, I took the two photos below with it!
Later that year, we were asked to build a proper optical bench for the analogue photography class. It was still a camera obscura but much more sophisticated: the small hole was replaced with a larger one with lens and changeable various diaphragms; it had an expandable accordion bellows to allow the lens to be moved for focusing and to allow movements to correct distortion and avoid converging or diverging verticals.
― my optical bench and a candid of 2010-me in action.
― below, a few of the best shots I took with it in my student bedroom, which I also manually developed in the 'darkroom' I made out of the storage closet, equipped with red safelight and all!
I then moved onto taking pictures with a reflex camera (the Petri I photographed above), developing my own 35 mm film too for my photography class exam:
In 2010 I finally delved into the digital with a Canon 1000D and started blogging:
At times I would still play around with analogue photography and lomography using a Diana F+, the very precursor of today app 'filters' with its vignetting, blurring, overlapping and light leaks:
